>
>>(7). And now they are going to try to foist yet another OS onto the
>>consumers so
>>that they can squeeze one more round of "milking the faithful".
>
>Each new OS has added significant features to the Mac. I would think that
>only someone too cheap to spend $100 or less would gripe about that.
>:)

Well, the MacOS desperately needs a kick in the pants. Apple and Gates
have the dubious distinction of having taught personal computer users to
think that crashing and rebooting once a day is normal.

Windows NT sort of crept in under Bill's guard as solid technology bought
on the cheap from Digital. It is now reliable enough (v. 4.0) to allow you
to leave your computer on for weeks without a system crash, no matter how
many badly behaved applications crash on you.

It's no accident that most of the world's Web servers use some flavour of
UNIX, which can run for months and years without a system crash, surviving
any number of system crashes. Imagine the riots if the host computers of
airline booking systems ran on MacOS or Win95!!

As a Macintosh owner (Power Mac 7200/120, MacOS 7.5.5, soon 8.1) I find it
absurd that you have to buy a third-party solution like RAM Doubler to get
proper dynamic memory-management. This despite the fact that hardware
memory-management (= fast and efficient) has been available on the CPU
since the 68030. Or that I have to wait while so many modal dialogues do
their thing before returning control to you or that an application can
decide when the next process can have a turn at the CPU (lack of
pre-emptive multitasking). Or that one application can eat another, or
even the OS, for lunch (lack of protected memory).

Weep for the late lamented Rhapsody, Mackers!

Hedley



=================================================================== Hedley Finger
User documentation and publishing consultant
Adobe(R) Certified Expert, FrameMaker 5.5

Hand Holding Projects Pty Ltd ACN 007 418 153
28 Regent Street Burwood VIC 3125 Australia
Tel +61 3 9809 1229 Fax +61 3 9809 1326 Mobile +61 412 461 558
E-mail hfinger@handholding.com.au